Pending magisterial inquiries

I refer to the information released by the Justice Ministry and the comments made by its minister as detailed in the article 'Over 1,700 magisterial inquiries pending' - The Sunday Times, June 29.

The minister is totally wrong in saying that I have 231 pending inquires and he should have checked his figures before going public. Since my appointment in 1996 my grand total of pending inquiries as at the end of May stands at 42, dating back to 2006 which means that I have no pending inquiry from 1996 to 2006.

What the minister did not realise is that in early 2007, all pending inquiries of magistrate Joseph Cassar totalling 219 were assigned to me for closure. The relevant files were kept in a very disorganised fashion, without any sort of register. My staff had to bring everything up to date and up to my standards only to find out that there were inquires not even known to the administration.

My average backlog of inquires invariably stands at 30 and never dating more than two years. You can therefore appreciate my feeling of frustration when I was faced with such a backlog. Of these 219, only 125 inquires remained pending as at the end of May, of which 68 are in the outtray ready for typing. Fifteen of my inquires are also ready for typing but the administration refuses to approve overtime for my staff to deal with this backlog as they are inundated with the workload.

Despite my excessive workload, there is never any mention of events such as Air Malta's Airbus crash with a pylon which was dealt with in a record one month involving hundreds of pages. There was also the mammoth task of dealing with the finding of a baby and mother on the seabed at Ċirkewwa, the theft of approximately Lm1 million from HSBC, which was concluded within weeks - and all this without ever relenting from the pace to keep up with all work assigned to me.

This sudden rush of pending inquires was coupled with an even greater delivery of 700 pending cases of the same magistrate, 160 of which had been put off for judgment for several years. These cases relate to the Rural Leases Board, the Land Arbitration Board and the Rent Regulation Board. Once again I found that the relevant records were kept in a shameful state and these included some 250 cases of expropriation due for compensation dating back to 1972.

Apart from having to deal with this unexpected backlog, I was also detailed to maintain my own caseload which includes criminal inquiries, traffic sittings and civil duty roster.

It would be interesting to learn why the minister has woken up to what he claims to be an untenable situation when he has been aware of such figures for many years. Case statistics are handed over to the court administration at the end of every month and I therefore ask the minister what action he took during his tenure as Parliamentary Secretary in the ministry he now heads, when Magistrate Cassar (his colleague during tenure of office as Parliamentary Secretary for the Elderly before being nominated as magistrate) managed to accumulate such figures. It would also be interesting to know what the Commission for the Administration of Justice, aware of all pending cases, did to bring to account whoever was responsible for the backlog which ended up in my lap.

My record of case management speaks for itself and it was only then Justice Minister Austin Gatt who publicly praised my performance in dealing with the situation at the Gozo Law Courts. Upon my appointment I was faced with 1,800 pending ETC cases and 650 in the Gozo courts, some dating back to 1980. In my first year, I managed to deliver 1,000 judgments in Gozo and the backlog today stands at 57.

When the ETC cases were assigned to another magistrate I had only 13 in my name and the figure now stands at nil. I also had the Ħamrun and Żabbar district cases and these were also transferred to other colleagues with a nil return.

In the meantime, I wish to thank the minister for helping me realise that it does me no good to strive to conclude cases at the expense of my family and my health, spending weekends and nights working on my caseload only to be unjustly judged by people who should have known better.